Status, Greed, and Power

Friday, August 21st, 2009

Matt Yglesias wonders why politicians are not more strongly motivated by higher ideals.

Selling the public good down the river to bolster your re-election chances isn’t like stealing a loaf of bread to feed your starving children. The welfare rolls are hardly stocked with the names of former members of congress. Indeed, it’s not even clear that voting “the wrong way” poses particularly serious threats to one’s re-election. But even if it did, one might assume that people who bother to dedicating their lives to securing vast political power did so because they actually wanted to accomplish something and get in the history books, perhaps, as one of the big heroes of their era.

Tyler Cowen comments,

Many people — especially those who become politicians — really do want fame and power and it is amazing what they will talk themselves into to get there and to stay there. They don’t even want fame in the sense of being recognized, in the longer run, for having done the right thing. They want more personal influence and power now.

Arnold Kling adds that he would explain excessive risk-taking and high pay for CEO’s on similar lines:

Just substitute “CEO’s” for “politicians” in Tyler’s paragraph.
Both the corporate world and the political world are high-stakes status games, and we would expect the successful players to be the ones that are most highly skilled and motivated to play. As far as motivation is concerned, I think that the extremes tend to be in the male gender. The desire to dominate, to be the alpha male, has to be very powerful if you are going to get to the top in business or politics, because those are very popular status games. If you are willing to play a different status game — trying to be the best tiddly-winks player in your area or the leading expert on tribal customs on Bora-Bora — you don’t have to be quite so driven and ruthless about it.

One of the points that I make in my forthcoming Unchecked and Unbalanced is that the growth in concentrated political power in this country leads to a system that selects for leaders with exaggerated senses of self-importance and a remarkable lack of perspective on their own foibles (think of Elliot Spitzer or Mark Sanford or John Edwards). One of the problems with large-scale politics and large-scale capitalism is that there is this tendency to select the most overconfident, driven, and aggressive men for leadership positions.

Posted in Arnold Kling, Policy | No Comments »

Denmark and Sweden: Expectations versus Experience

Friday, August 21st, 2009

Bryan Caplan is back from Denmark and Sweden, and he compares his expectations to his experiences:

Matters were worse than I expected — especially in Denmark, where I got to see the “happiest people on earth” miserably bike to work in the rain.
[...]
In fact, if there were a reality t.v. show called “Swapping Countries” where middle-class Americans and Swedes lived in each other’s countries for a year, I predict that only 5% of Americans wouldn’t want to go home — versus about 50% of Swedes.

When we visited Denmark, our cabbie on the ride back to the airport — a nice middle-aged woman who spoke flawless English — explained that the direct tax on cars was comparable to the cost of the car itself.

That makes bicycling in the rain look downright pleasant.

That overqualified cabbie also speaks to Caplan’s second point:

One of the most striking things about Denmark and Sweden: Almost everyone is overqualified for his job. The guy who sells train tickets doesn’t just punch buttons and collect cash; he knows his regional transit network like the back of his hand, and eagerly helps you plan your trip.

I’m sure that most American tourists find this a welcome change of pace. Imagine a country where you never have to ask, “Could I talk to your supervisor?” But it’s highly inefficient. In the U.S., the Dane who mans the ticket window would run the whole office. In Denmark, he spends 59 minutes out of 60 doing mindless, menial work.

When I explained my observation to some Swedes, there was an interesting misunderstanding. One told me: “Unskilled workers? We don’t have unskilled workers.” I replied, “I’ve seen guys picking up garbage. Isn’t that unskilled?” And the Swede answered, “We have unskilled work, but not unskilled workers.” My point exactly.

What’s going on? Americans tend to credit Europe’s better schools, but I doubt that’s a major part of the story. The main reason why European workers seem so good, as many Scandinavians admitted, is that they keep semi-competent workers permanently on welfare.

It’s tempting to see this approach as “more efficient” or “kinder-hearted” than ours, but it’s neither. Using high-skilled workers to sell train tickets when low-skilled workers are almost as good violates the principle of comparative advantage. And it’s hardly kind to create a system where workers feel unchallenged, and non-workers feel useless. The European approach may be good for flustered tourists. But for the Europeans themselves, it’s a tragic waste.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Not Quite Hercules

Friday, August 21st, 2009

When I recently read an old Modern Mechanix piece from 1930, I came across this old Charles Atlas ad, featuring his measurements:

I couldn’t help but wonder, where are his thigh measurements? Heck, where are his thighs? Everything else seems close to the classic Greek ideals, but his legs seem scrawny — not quite Hercules:

Posted in Fitness | No Comments »

Scientists develop high-yield deep water rice

Friday, August 21st, 2009

Japanese scientists have developed high-yield deep-water rice:

According to the report, as water levels rise, accumulation of the plant hormone ethylene activates the SNORKEL genes, making stem growth more rapid. When the researchers introduced the genes into rice that does not normally survive in deep water, they were able to rescue the plants from drowning.

Motoyuki Ashikari, who headed the project, said his team is hoping to use the gene on long grain rice widely used in Southeast Asia to help stabilize production in flood-prone areas where rice with the flood-resistant gene is low in production — about one-third to one-quarter that of regular rice.

“Scientifically, the gene that we found is rare but clear proof of a biological ability to adapt to a harsh environment,” he said. “It’s a genetic strategy specifically to survive flooding.”

Ashikari said his team already successfully tested the gene on a Japanese “Japonica” rice, and his team now plans to create a flood-resistant long grain rice in three to four years for use in countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Cambodia.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

Robert Zemeckis circles "Yellow Submarine" remake

Friday, August 21st, 2009

Robert Zemeckis is in negotiations to direct a remake of the 1968 animated Beatles feature “Yellow Submarine” for the Walt Disney Studios:

Like all Zemeckis’ animated productions — among them “The Polar Express” and “Beowulf” — “Submarine” would be done in performance capture and would be a digital 3D endeavor.

I don’t want to sound like a Blue Meanie, but seriously?

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Neill Blomkamp’s Malthusian fable of post-Apartheid Johannesburg

Friday, August 21st, 2009

Steve Sailer calls District 9 Neill Blomkamp’s Malthusian fable of post-Apartheid Johannesburg:

The American press constantly refers to District 9 as an “apartheid allegory,” but the 29-year-old Blomkamp was ten when Nelson Mandela was released. Blomkamp’s press statements can hardly be more explicit that the movie is largely a post-apartheid parable about illegal immigration and Malthusian despair.

In fact, Blomkamp is personally a victim of the gradual ethnic cleansing of southern Africa. Rampant crime under the new black government drove his family from Johannesburg to British Columbia in 1997.

But Americans just don’t get it because they haven’t paid attention to South Africa since 1994, when Nelson Mandela was elected President and then They All Lived Happily Ever After. Blomkamp told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Everybody in North America thinks of South Africa for white oppression of the black majority.” Yet, 15 years later, “what we’re not familiar with is this screwed-up Johannesburg setting.”

Just as 1981’s Road Warrior, with Mel Gibson as Mad Max, memorably re-imagined the defining Australian experience of living on an empty continent, District 9 symbolizes the lesson of Afrikaans history: on an increasingly full continent, the weak can eventually triumph over the strong by outbreeding them.

Posted in Media, Policy | No Comments »

Venture Bros. Season 4 Trailer

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

I can only imagine what the Venture Bros. Season 4 Trailer looks like to the uninitiated:

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Reverse Dominance Hierarchies

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

Why are our leaders so slightly above average? Because, Eric Falkenstein explains, humans prefer reverse dominance hierarchies:

The gist of his idea is that a love of dominance was so bred into the human species (males above all) during their long, shared hominid past, that they developed an innate distaste of being dominated by others. Thus armed with a motive, and using the cooperative skills which language and their big brains conferred upon them, all the lesser males in a group who were in danger of being dominated by an alpha male, would form a ‘reverse dominance hierarchy’ to put the would-be tyrant in his place. In this way, dominance behavior, while not eliminated entirely, could be moderated and dispersed.

As the anthropologist Harold Schneider puts it: ‘all men seek to rule, but if they cannot, they seek to be equal’. Upstarts are put in their place in a variety of ways. For example, !Kung bushmen will mock the gift of someone, because they see gift giving as an attempt to signal superior status. In effect, they ridicule this act because they see it as a pretext (clever bushmen!). In more complex societies, groups of men actually kill the upstart for a crime conveniently determined. Thus, egalitarianism is an implication of this aversion to strong rulers.

So much political punditry is a farce because all these policy wonks parse the words of politicians as if they were The Oracle at Delphi. Any real depth in these remarks is like reading one’s anxieties into inkblots. If you read the text of any politician, the main feature is its blandness, the smarmy, recycled clichés that allow listeners to believe it means whatever they want it to. The president of the US, like the president of your senior class, or the general secretary of the UN, is someone chosen for his malleability and his simultaneous ability to appear non-malleable, as if we want him to be smart sounding but not smart. It’s tolerable once you realize its comical.

At the margin there are differences, sometimes greater than others, but one must admit that the main attribute of such ‘leaders’ is being ingratiating and non-threatening to the greatest number of people. Humans do not wish to have ‘rulers’ with high intelligence or education, because these people would be less controllable.

I think we can all agree that this explains why we‘re not in charge.

Posted in Eric Falkenstein, Policy, Science | No Comments »

Secrets of the Mystery Gun that Shelled Paris

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

The June, 1930 issue of Modern Mechanix has a well-illustrated piece revealing the secrets of the mystery gun that shelled Paris during the Great War a dozen years earlier:

There was a barrel 120 feet in length, approximately twice as long as the biggest guns built to that time — so long, in fact, that the end had to be supported in the air to keep it from bending down and being shot off by its own shell. In fact, that very thing happened to the first of the guns tested at the German proving ground, for the barrel bent a full inch under its own weight.

Next they fired a shell 75 to 80 miles or more, over a total trajectory ranging from 90 to nearly 100 miles.

To do that the shell was shot 24 miles above the earth, higher than any man-made thing, save possibly a small sounding balloon, had ever penetrated. At that extreme height the shell traveled through what was almost a vacuum, at a temperature of far more than 100 degrees below zero.

The shell, traveling at an average speed of 30 miles a minute — or sixty times as fast as the usual legal rate for automobiles — took three minutes to complete its aerial flight of 90 miles. It remained away from the earth so long, in fact, that the old world revolved on in space while the projectile was away, so the gunners had to aim a half mile east of the target in order that the target might be there when the shell arrived to hit it.

Posted in Technology, War | No Comments »

The world’s first cocaine bar

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

Route 36, an underground club in Bolivia, is (supposedly) the world’s first cocaine bar:

Down in Route 36′s main room, the scene is chilled. A half-hearted disco ball sporadically bathes the room in red and green light. Each table has candles and a stash of bottled water, plus whatever mixers one cares to add to your drink. In the corner, a pile of board games includes chess, backgammon, and Jenga, the game in which a steady hand pulls out bricks from a tower of blocks until the whole pile collapses. If it weren’t for the heads bobbing down like birds scouring the seashore for food, you would never know that huge amounts of cocaine were being casually ingested. There’s a lot of mingling from table to table. Everyone here has stories — the latest adventures from Ecuador, the best bus to Peru — and even the most wired “why-won’t-he-shut-up?” traveller is given a generous welcome before being sent back to his table, where he can repeat those stories another 10 times.

“Everyone knows about this place,” says Jonas, a backpacker who arrived two days earlier. “My mate came to Bolivia last year and he said, ‘Route 36 is the best lounge in all of South America.’” It is certainly the most bizarre and brazen. Though cocaine is illegal in Bolivia, Route 36 is fast becoming an essential stop for thousands of tourists who come here every year and happily sample the country’s cocaine, which is famous for both its availability, price (around €15 a gram) and purity.

The scene here is peaceful; there seems no fear that anyone will be caught. (“The owner has paid off all the right people,” one waiter says with a smile.) A female backpacker from Newcastle slips on to one of the four couches arranged around the table. “We’ve brought some [cocaine] virgins here. This will be their first time, so we are just rubbing it on their lips. But they are lucky – you could never get such pure coke back home. In London you pay 50 quid for a gram that’s been cut so much, all it does it make your lips numb and sends you to the bathroom.”

Travellers’ blogs also give the place a good writeup. “I travelled the world for nine months, and for sure La Paz was the craziest city and Route 36 the best bar of my entire trip,” writes one, while another says, “Like to burn the candle at both ends? Well, here you can bloody well torch the whole candle.”

Posted in Business, Policy | No Comments »

Roads that are designed to kill

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

When Mark Rosenberg showed some Swedish friends a photo of where he’d found a runner who’d been hit by a car, they exclaimed, Your streets are designed to kill people!

They said that the thin painted white lines at the intersection could not be seen at dawn, nor was there a raised bump to or a narrowing of the road to demarcate the intersection and slow down traffic. They said the speed limit should be 30 kilometers per hour (about 18.6 miles per hour) or less if we wanted pedestrians to have much of a chance of surviving. They also said traffic lights increased the number of deaths because people often speed up when the light turns yellow.

When Sweden removed red lights from intersections and replaced them with traffic circles or rotaries, death rates at these intersections fell by 80 to 90 percent.

Sweden has also adopted a philosophy called Vision Zero, believing it can eradicate road traffic deaths.

Vision Zero started about 30 years ago, when traffic safety researcher Claes Tingvall got the idea that we didn’t have to accept road traffic deaths as a fact of life. Tingvall and his colleagues said that these deaths were not “accidents’’ but were predictable and preventable. And they set out to prove it.

One of the ways they began to protect people was to put barriers down the center of two-lane roads. They showed that this could be done cheaply. When Mylar – a strong polyester film – is supported by closely spaced plastic poles, it can keep cars from crossing the median. When the Swedes used this type of center barrier to separate the traffic going in opposite directions, they effectively prevented head-on collisions and the death rate on these roads fell by 70 percent to 80 percent.

Posted in Urbanism | No Comments »

Online Education Beats the Classroom

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education, concludes that students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction:

The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.

Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.

“The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing — it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction,” said Barbara Means, the study’s lead author and an educational psychologist at SRI International.

Posted in Education, Technology | No Comments »

Taleb is a classic crank

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

In Martin Gardner’s taxonomy, Eric Falkenstein explains, Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a classic crank:

  1. They have a profound intellectual superiority complex.
  2. They regard other researchers as idiotic, and always operate outside the peer review.
  3. They believe there is a campaign against their ideas, a campaign compared with the persecution of Galileo or Pasteur.
  4. They attack only the biggest theories and scientific figures.
  5. They attack only the biggest theories and scientific figures.

On his personal website, Taleb once described himself as being “an essayist, belletrist, literary-philosophical-mathematical flâneur,” a conception that some people finding endearing, me not so much. Literary-philosophical-mathematical types,- especially flâneurs – tend to be ‘full of themselves,’ supporting Gardner ’s characteristic #1. He prides himself on not submitting articles to refereed journals, considers most people who are indifferent to him as fools, and disdains editors, even spellcheckers (#2). He proudly notes that someone told him “in another time he would have been hanged [for what, inanity?].” Wilmott Magazine, a quant publication published by his colleague Paul Wilmott, wrote a fawning article about him in which they noted that he is “Wall Street’s principal dissident. Heretic! Calvin to finance’s Catholic Church” (#3). His website states his modest desire to understand chance from the viewpoint of “philosophy/epistemology, philosophy/ethics, mathematics, social science/finance, and cognitive science”, supporting #4. Lastly, for #5, he has gone so far as to print a glossary for his neologisms (eg, “epistemic arrogance” for “overconfidence”). In Martin Gardner’s taxonomy, Taleb is a classic crank.
[...]
Taleb is consistently amusing because his criticisms of others apply so neatly to himself: he claims he is an empiricist yet supports his points with anecdotes. The Black Swan makes fun of ‘experts’ with credentials, but he states he does not deign to engage with anyone not sufficiently expert; he states he is not interested in being a speaker-bureau commodity , but routinely travels the rubber chicken circuit; he derides forecasters who don’t give a full accounting of their prior forecasting history, yet delinks old remarks about Value-at-Risk, and recategorized his extinct Hedge Fund as a hedge, not a fund; he claims to prize humility, yet is most immodest; he argues against applying the law of large numbers, and also of inferring too much from small samples; people apply models to reality in biased manner, people naively extrapolate data without the appropriate theory; forward thinking is adaptive, forward thinking is error-laiden. Some people think inconsistency is a sign of genius; I think it just reflects confused thinking.

Read the whole thing. I skipped ahead to the punch-line. Falkenstein poked fun at Taleb earlier, too.

Posted in Economics, Eric Falkenstein, Nassim Nicholas Taleb | 2 Comments »

Santa’s Video Game Workshop

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

These images from Amusement‘s Made of Myth piece conjure up Santa’s Video Game Workshop — just add elves:

(Hat tip to Chris.)

Posted in Games, Media | No Comments »

How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

I cringe when I see Fast Company parody itself with headlines like How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education — but I found this bit on Western Governors University intriguing:

If open courseware is about applying technology to sharing knowledge, and Peer2Peer is about social networking for teaching and learning, Bob Mendenhall, president of the online Western Governors University, is proudest of his college’s innovation in the third, hardest-to-crack dimension of education: accreditation and assessment.

WGU was formed in the late 1990s, when the governors of 19 western states decided to take advantage of the newfangled Internet and create an online university to expand access to students in rural communities across their region. Today, it’s an all-online university with 12,000 students in all 50 states. It’s a private not-for-profit, like Harvard; the only state money was an initial $100,000 stake from each founding state. WGU runs entirely on tuition: $2,890 for a six-month term.

“We said, ‘Let’s create a university that actually measures learning,’ ” Mendenhall says. “We do not have credit hours, we do not have grades. We simply have a series of assessments that measure competencies, and on that basis, award the degree.”

WGU began by convening a national advisory board of employers, including Google and Tenet Healthcare. “We asked them, ‘What is it the graduates you’re hiring can’t do that you wish they could?’ We’ve never had a silence after that question.” Then assessments were created to measure each competency area. Mendenhall recalls one student who had been self-employed in IT for 15 years but never earned a degree; he passed all the required assessments in six months and took home his bachelor’s without taking a course.

Most students, though, do the full coursework, working at their own pace through online course modules, playlists of prerecorded lectures, readings, projects, and quizzes. For every 80 students, a PhD faculty member, certified in the discipline, serves as a full-time mentor. “Our faculty are there to guide, direct, counsel, coach, encourage, motivate, keep on track, and that’s their whole job,” Mendenhall says.

Multiple-choice tests are scored by computer, while essays and in-person evaluations are judged by a separate cadre of graders. What WGU is doing is using the Internet to disaggregate the various functions of teaching: the “sage on the stage” conveyor of information, the cheerleader and helpmate, and the evaluator. WGU constantly surveys both graduates and their employers to find out if they are lacking in any competencies so they can continue to fine-tune their programs.

Mendenhall is impatient with those who argue that what he’s doing with education and technology is unworkable. “Technology has changed the productivity equation of every industry except education,” he says. “We’re simply trying to demonstrate that it can do it in education — if you change the way you do education as opposed to just adding technology on top.”

Posted in Business, Education, Technology | No Comments »

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